Ask a campaign manager at a PR or influencer agency what they did yesterday and you will rarely hear "strategy". You will hear: chased two creators for signed contracts, re-sent a brief that went unanswered, pulled screenshots into a client deck, checked whether a post finally went live. Necessary work, all of it. None of it is what the client is actually paying a premium for.
Add it up per creator and you land on a striking number: roughly ten hours of manual operations per creator, per campaign. That is the figure we hear consistently from senior people at Benelux PR firms: not a study, not a benchmark report, just the same answer coming back again and again when you ask people to count honestly.
Ten hours sounds survivable. The problem is what it multiplies into.
Where the ten hours actually go
Walk through a single creator on a single campaign and count for yourself.
Sourcing. Someone searches a discovery tool (Modash, Lefty, or often a spreadsheet built over years), filters by niche and audience, and builds a shortlist. Per creator who makes the final list, that is real time, because for every name that survives, several were reviewed and dropped.
Vetting. Now the shortlist gets checked. Audience quality. A scroll through past content for brand-safety issues. Previous brand deals, in case there is a conflict with the client or a competitor. This is slow, careful, screen-by-screen work.
Outreach and negotiation. First email or DM. The follow-up when it goes quiet. Rate discussion. Contract sent, contract chased, contract signed. Rarely one exchange; usually five or six, spread across two weeks.
Briefing. The campaign brief gets tailored: deliverables, deadlines, do's and don'ts, hashtags, disclosure requirements. Then the questions come in, one creator at a time, and each needs an answer.
Follow-up. Chase the draft. Review it. Send corrections. Chase the revised draft. Confirm the posting date. Check the post actually went live, with the right tag and the right disclosure. Chase usage rights if the client wants to reuse the content.
Reporting. Screenshots collected before stories expire. Reach, engagement and link clicks pulled from three different places. Everything formatted into the client's deck template.
No single step looks alarming. An hour here, ninety minutes there. Together, across the full life of one creator relationship in one campaign, they stack to around ten hours, and almost all of it is chasing, checking, copying and formatting. Rule-following work. Not judgment.
The multiplication table nobody puts in the proposal
Now scale it.
A 30-creator campaign at ten hours per creator is roughly 300 hours of manual operations. That is close to two people doing nothing else for a month, before anyone has done any strategy, any creative development, or any client management.
Run five campaigns like that in a year and you are at roughly 1,500 hours. A full-time working year in most of Europe is not much more than that. In other words: somewhere across your payroll, a full working year of skilled people's time is spent purely pushing the same six steps through inboxes and spreadsheets, over and over.
Ten hours per creator is the one campaign cost that grows one-for-one with creator count.
Why campaigns quietly cap at twenty creators
Agency leaders rarely experience this as "1,500 hours". They experience it as a ceiling.
Ask why a campaign was scoped at 15 or 20 creators rather than 60, and the honest answer is rarely budget or strategy. It is coordination capacity. Twenty creators is where one campaign manager stops being able to hold every thread (every unsigned contract, every unanswered brief, every unposted post) in their head and their inbox at once. Go past it and things get dropped, and dropped things become client calls.
So the team scopes what it can operationally survive, not what the campaign actually needs. Micro-creator strategies that would perform better with 80 small accounts get flattened into 15 mid-sized ones, because 80 is unmanageable by hand. The ops burden is silently shaping the strategy, backwards.
Why fee pressure turns this into a margin problem
If fees were rising, ten hours per creator would be an annoyance. They are not rising. Procurement teams benchmark agency rates harder every year, retainers get squeezed, and briefs increasingly ask for more creators (more micro and nano accounts) for the same money.
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic: the manual work scales linearly with creator count (double the creators, double the hours), and your only traditional lever for absorbing it is hiring more coordinators. Every new coordinator raises cost roughly in step with capacity. Margin never improves; it just holds, at best. Meanwhile the work itself is completely non-differentiating. No client has ever chosen an agency for its contract-chasing ability. They choose you for judgment, relationships and creative instinct: the parts that currently get whatever hours are left over.
That is the real 10-hours-per-creator problem. It is not that the work is tedious. It is that it eats the exact capacity that should be compounding into better strategy and bigger campaigns.
The part automation is actually good at
Notice what the six steps above have in common: they follow rules. Check whether the contract came back; if not, send the agreed nudge. Pull the metrics; put them in the template. Compare the draft against the brief's checklist. This is precisely the kind of repetitive, rule-following work that automation now handles well, and precisely the kind of work generic chatbots have not fixed, because a chatbot does not know your roster, your rates or which contract is still unsigned. If your team has already tried an AI tool that fizzled after a fortnight, Why agency AI projects plateau within weeks explains the pattern.
The judgment calls do not move. Which creator genuinely fits the brand, how to handle a tricky negotiation, what feedback to give on a draft, how to steer the client. That stays with your team, where it belongs. What moves is the chasing, checking, copying and formatting around those calls.
Our approach starts with whichever workflow step is most rule-bound (reporting and follow-up are the natural starting points), and we treat a pilot as failed unless manual time on that step drops by at least 70%. A first pilot is up and running within 3–4 weeks, on one step, not a grand platform. And once the full chase-check-copy layer is automated, step by step, the team that caps campaigns at 20 creators today could run 100, which changes what you can pitch, not just what you can deliver.
Start by measuring your own number
Before buying anything (or believing anyone, including us), do one thing: take your last completed campaign and count. Hours per creator, per step: sourcing, vetting, outreach, briefing, follow-up, reporting. It takes an afternoon with the campaign manager who lived it. You will find one step that dominates, and it will almost certainly be rule-following work rather than judgment. That step is your starting point, and knowing it puts you in control of any automation conversation that follows, including the question of who should build and run it, which we take apart in Who should own your agency's AI stack?.